International Organizations and their Offspring

Tana Johnson (2014) Organizational Progeny: Why Governments are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance, Cambridge University Press, Oxford, UK, 304 pages, $39.99, ISBN: 978-0198717799.

Are states losing control to IOs? A review of Organizational Progeny

Joshua Busby

LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas Austin, TX, USA.E-mail: busbyj@utexas.edu

This is a sophisticated multi-method study that seeks to chart the influence of international bureaucrats. Johnson starts with the realization that most new international organizations are created as offspring of existing ones. Those organizations seek to shape the landscape of new creations to their advantage and insulate them from state influence in terms of voting, funding and oversight.

Johnson seeks to understand variation in insulation. She argues that inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) are more capable of shaping the creation of new IGOs under two conditions: (i) when they themselves are moderately insulated from state interference, and (ii) when they have access to allies in other IGOs, NGOs, states and other organizations. She qualifies her argument, suggesting that if the intended organization covers an issue of ‘high salience’ to states (namely security issues) then she would not expect the new organization to enjoy much insulation from state influence. In addition, she suggests that when the new organization is being negotiated by a highly capable group of states, then they might not turn to existing IGOs whose expertise is normally needed in the creation of new organizations.

To assess her theory, Johnson first does a random draw of 180 organizations from a wider list of IGOs and assesses whether they were created by states alone or in concert with international bureaucrats. She finds that between 55 and 80 per cent of organizations created since the 1950s were created with the involvement of other IGOs. She then develops an econometric model to test her specific predictions, that IGOs created by other IGOs ought to show more insulation from state influence, as operationalized in the degree of financial domination by states, the frequency of oversight meetings, whether states possess veto power, and the extent to which states monopolize representation in the IGO.

Here, Johnson is exhaustive in her analysis including bivariate relationships, ordered probit models, negative binomial models, propensity score matching, as well as an exploration of potential alternative explanations, including whether the nature of the issue covered an area of high politics and if the issue was a technical one that demanded specific IGO expertise. While the book reports the statistical tests, Johnson presents the material with some simple tables that should be accessible to non-expert readers. She also painstakingly walks the reader through different pieces of her argument accompanied by diagrams to remind the reader where they are in the theoretical narrative. Finally, Johnson also makes good use of Clarify software to translate coefficients into substantive significance. For example, she finds that if international bureaucrats designed an IGO with limited to no input from states, then the likelihood states will carry out oversight meetings once or more per year declines by 46 percentage points.

Beyond the economic analysis, she does a deeper dive in detailed case studies of a number of organizations, namely the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with slightly shorter treatments of the World Food Program, the United Nations Development Program(me), UNAIDS, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Financial Action Task Force.

I found the argument on some level to be too narrow and too broad. In terms of narrow, I think one could find examples of security organizations where IGOs have had a hand in their creation. While the aggregate findings may be true, that IGOs are less likely to provide much of a role for international bureaucrats if they are related to international security, there may be organizations in the security space where existing IGOs played a role in issue creation and IGO formation. For example, it seems reasonable that some IGOs had a hand in recent IGOs and intergovernmental agreements such as the International Criminal Court and the Landmines Ban because NGOs are known to have had considerable influence over those processes as documented by scholars such as Richard Price, Ken Rutherford, Nicole Deitelhoff, Caroline Fehl, among others. Indeed, non-governmental organizations have been some of the important boosters of disarmament and arms control processes.

NGOs in their independence and freedom to pursue advocacy may have more scope than IGOs for influencing (or at least openly seeking to influence) security-oriented processes, but IGOs may have more quiet behind the scenes influence on some organization creation processes even in the security space. By ceding the realm of high politics to states, Johnson risks giving too much ground to other theoretical approaches. For example, the United Nations (UN) has a mixed record when it comes to peacekeeping and conflict resolution, often hamstrung both by its own caution and donor meddling and in-fighting. On some level, each UN peacekeeping mission can be thought of as a new institutional creation, with opportunities for state intervention and UN and IGO influence over the mandate. Some of these missions are more salient than others to state intervention, and one probably observes more UN influence (and possibly success) in peacekeeping episodes where states let the UN do its job. While Johnson tests the limits of her argument in the security space by examining the role of IGO’s in the creation of the IEA, she could push the point further with a more direct test of variation of IGO influence among security-oriented organizations.

That said, in other ways, the book’s claims are also too broad. The book’s subtitle implies that states are ‘losing control’ to international bureaucrat influence. I find this unpersuasive, perhaps a title the press advocated to make the book more appealing to a non-academic audience. While complexity and interdependence in the world may make some problems difficult to govern, states possess the capabilities and resources to override international bureaucrats if they feel so inclined by starving organizations of resources, by forum-shopping or by intervening to clean house at organizations through personnel and rules changes. In some areas that are putatively low politics, there are examples of state influence, suggesting that states periodically may find other issues to be of sufficient salience to warrant more oversight and interference.

For example, Chapter 5 focuses on the IPCC, a scientific organization mostly known for its periodic reports evaluating the science of climate change, with three working group covering the physical science, impacts and mitigation, respectively. Johnson writes that the IPCC proved to be no ‘pushover’ to the influence of powerful states such as the United States. The IPCC, she argues, was ultimately partially insulated from state interference because of influence bureaucrats from the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. For example, the synthesis for policymakers (that accompanies the overall report and each working group report) is evaluated line-by-line by state delegates. However, states do not have the same say over the longer reports prepared by scientists.

While all of this is true about the IPCC, the key decision-making body for action on climate change is the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The secretariat, located in Bonn, is responsible for organizing the annual conference of the parties (COPs) during which state delegations meet to decide what actions are necessary to deal with the problem. In their book on the comparative politics of international environmental bureaucracies, editors Frank Biermann and Bernd Siebenhüner find that the UNFCCC has the least agency of any of the nine bureaucracies they explore, what they call a ‘straightjacket’. Climate change is sufficiently salient and politically contested that state interest in the issue and control over the agenda are high, limiting the scope for independent action by the UNFCCC. Throughout much of the 2000s, powerful states like the United States and China remained opposed to international action on climate change. As a consequence, the meetings of the COPs took on a dull formalism, what Joanne Depledge called ‘ossification’. It was not until 2009 that the climate architecture would undergo a sea change at Copenhagen when states, led by US President Barack Obama, would negotiate a new bottom-up architecture of state commitments to action to replace the politically intractable targets and timetables treaty-based approach.

It could be that Johnson’s argument is limited to the early stages of IGO creation and agenda setting, but her claims about insulation and influence suggest a certain path-dependency of influence that endures beyond the formative years. I would have liked to see the climate discussion grapple explicitly with the difference between the IPCC, which as an advisory scientific body enjoys some if not complete insulation from state influence, and the UNFCCC, which as a convener of decision making, is severely circumscribed in its discretion and agency.

Similarly, in the health space, the book covers the important work of UNAIDS, a joint program of eleven United Nations agencies that emerged out of a previous office at the World Health Organization (WHO) that suffered from neglect by WHO leadership and ultimately was unable to coordinate the disparate AIDS-related enterprises of the UN. While states were active in the creation of UNAIDS (many IGOs did not like the idea of a joint program of coordination forced upon them), Johnson argues persuasively that IGO personnel (and WHO in particular) were able to actively shape the form that UNAIDS took, namely by incorporating AIDS activists as participants (if not full voting members) in the board structure that would help insulate decisions from being imposed by states on UNAIDS.

I am persuaded by this story of UNAIDS but the AIDS discussion on some level ends too soon for me. UNAIDS was created in 1996 as the main advocacy organization for coordinated UN messaging on AIDS, creating momentum by states and in the international arena broadly to do more about AIDS. However, the main financing organization, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, was not created until 2002. The Global Fund has channeled billions of dollars of finance to combat the AIDS crisis.

As UNAIDS’ Peter Piot argued in his memoir, international bureaucrats, namely himself and the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, were active in the creation of the Global Fund. The Global Fund has an even more robust board structure for civil society, private sector and developing country participation. However, states are the leading donors to that body, and they periodically have exercised leverage and oversight over the organization. When self-audits yielded reports of modest diversion of funds by recipients in 2011, the Global Fund went through a crisis, with the Board, led by pressure from the United States, foisting on the Executive Director Michel Kazatchine the creation of a new position of general manager in 2012 to oversee the administration of the fund. Kazatchine resigned in response, paving the way for Marc Dybul, former administrator of the US bilateral AIDS program PEPFAR, to become the Executive Director in 2013 and rescue the Global Fund’s confidence among major donors.

While the UNFCCC and Global Fund are but two examples, they both represent ostensibly ‘low politics’ issues that temporally became salient enough for states to intervene. They also represent venues with far more at stake in terms of decision making or resources than the examples in Johnson’s book, suggesting finer distinctions may be necessary than the salience of security as ‘high politics’ and other ‘low politics’ issues.

These quibbles aside, I found the meticulous research in Johnson’s book to be a model of multi-method, ambitious research, and I know her book will offer students of international organizations much insight for years to come.

Organizational Progeny: Whence and Whither?

Tanisha M. Fazal

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.

International relations has traditionally been conceived of as the study of how states conduct their affairs with each other. Tana Johnson’s important new book, Organizational Progeny, shows that this traditional view, and even the title of ‘international’ relations, is somewhat of a misnomer. Not only are many important transnational and international interactions conducted by non-governmental organizations, but the states that make up intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have much less control over the day-to-day workings of these organizations than the conventional view of IGOs would suggest. Indeed, as Johnson’s original data shows, the great majority of new IGOs are created by other IGOs. Yet, as the very name ‘inter-governmental’ suggests, the policies made via these organizations are meant to affect state behavior. The puzzle Johnson addresses is: how and why would states cede so much control to IGOs in the creation and design of their progeny?

Johnson’s bureaucratic political analysis of the creation and operation of various IGOs is clearly and carefully written. The book’s main selling point lies in the originality of its argument as well as the successful execution of its testing. The notion that IGOs will do what they can to insulate themselves and their progeny is one that is perfectly intuitive – once Johnson lays out her argument. In addition, great care is given to issues of endogeneity, scope conditions and case selection.

As all good books are, this one is extremely thought provoking. Thus, in the remainder of this review, I will raise five questions that emerged from my reading.

My first question refers to the subtitle of the book, which brings the ‘proliferating structures of global governance’ to the fore. While Johnson explains how proliferation works once the decision to create is taken, she does not examine proliferation as a dependent variable beyond showing that most IGOs are created by other IGOs (Figure 1.1, p. 8). It would be both interesting and useful to have a global sense of organizational progeny. For example, which types of IGO bureaucrats have been most successful in proliferating other organizations and why? On the basis of Johnson’s argument, we should expect that the most insulated IGOs will be the most likely to reproduce, both because they can, and because they are the best positioned to design similarly insulated progeny. But this first step of who decides to create new IGOs when is elided in the book, which focuses instead on the nature of organizations created. To what extent can Johnson’s argument be applied to an analysis of organizational proliferation itself?

My second question speaks to relevance. As we see especially in the cases discussed in Chapter 6, IGO bureaucrats are strategic in how they design and insulate new organizations. They consider how other actors might respond to their decisions, and adjust accordingly. They seek optimization, not just in the short term, but also in the medium to long term. Importantly, they realize that there can be too much of a good thing, and that creating an organization with too much insulation will lead to backlash from states. Johnson marshals an array of evidence to substantiate this point. For example, the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases was created by bureaucrats from the United Nations Environmental Program, who quickly learned the lesson of what can happen when there is too much insulation. ‘The sponsoring organizations permitted the Advisory Group to become so insulated, in fact, that many states hesitated to work with it’ (p. 117). The creators of the World Food Program were savvier, navigating a middle course between insulation and state control (p. 153). A similar dynamic is apparent in Peter Piot’s strategizing around the creation of UNAIDS, when he – as UNAIDS’ founding director – recognizes that ‘radical insulation from state control would undercut the legitimacy of his new organization’ (p. 178).

All this bureaucratic maneuvering raises the following question: If IGO bureaucrats are strategic in trying to avoid too much insulation in the creation phase, to what extent does this same type of strategy translate into policy? If these bureaucrats are strategic in the same way when it comes to their policymaking, what ultimate downstream effect does insulation have on policy? Insofar as these bureaucracies are sufficiently sensitive to state preferences and want to avoid backlash, the policy outcome might not be too far away from state preferences. Insulation is of course meant to be a buffer against backlash – this is the essence of Johnson’s argument – but the unanswered question of whether insulation creates effective distance between state preferences and IGO outcomes depends on an assumption of path dependence – that these organizations, once born and born in a certain way, will continue to develop in the mold they were cast.

My third question refers to the analysis of the two scope conditions – high politics and state capability/expertise – explored in Chapter 7, where Johnson seems to find that when states have capability/expertise we are less likely to observe insulation than when the issue is a high stakes one for states. This finding is somewhat surprising, and deserves further exploration. One high-stakes area, for example, where Johnson’s argument (with some adjustments) could apply quite nicely is in the proliferation of international humanitarian law – the laws of war – over the past 150 years or so. The laws of war have both increased in number and changed in character since the mid-nineteenth century. The change in character is a shift from the earliest laws of war – written in a way that favored belligerent rights – to modern laws of war, which focus on protected persons. This shift, coupled with the increasing number of the laws of war, has raised the standard of compliance so high that it may be untenable for many, if not most, states. This leads us to a question similar to the one that begins Organizational Progeny, about the International Panel on Climate Change: why would states agree to these laws of war which are, after all, codified in multilateral treaties, when the standards of compliance are so high? Here, I would not argue that the answer has to do with IGO bureaucrats per se – or at least, not only IGO bureaucrats – but rather with another, similar group that claims expertise: international lawyers. A survey of who is in the room during these law of war conferences – including current efforts with respect to cyber and lethal autonomous weapons systems – would reveal many lawyers and NGO representatives. But the military is under-represented in these meetings. What is more, this composition of attendees represents a change. The military used to be more represented at conferences that made the laws of war. Over time, however, there has been an increasing distance between law-makers and law-takers that ends up producing an outcome that may not work for the very states that technically sponsored it. Related, it would also be interesting and important to identify other high-politics areas where Johnson’s argument might apply.

My fourth question is: Who are the international bureaucrats? They do a lot of work in the analysis, and sometimes make personal appearances, but typically only at the highest levels.

I particularly wonder if there is any kind of revolving door in terms of employment between IGO and state bureaucrats that could be of consequence – are preferences and knowledge carried over from one kind of institution to another, or do IGO bureaucrats tend to stay in the IGO world (I suspect that they do)? And, given that Johnson focuses on the higher-level bureaucrats – the heads and founders of organizations – to what extent is their norm entrepreneurship a neglected theoretical factor in the analysis, as in the cases of John Orr and Frank MacDougall regarding the World Food Program, Hans Singer and David Owen and the United Nations Development Program, and Halfdan Mahler (from the World Health Organization) and Jonathan Mann in the formation of UNAIDS?

My fifth and final question is both methodological and substantive, and refers to case selection. Overall, the case selection is well executed. The focus in both the quantitative and qualitative analysis is rightly on the cases that advance the argument. But regression analysis is not possible without some cases that are not predicted by the model, and it is these cases that pique my curiosity. What are examples of model mispredictions? Can Johnson’s theory offer an explanation for them? Exposing some of the imperfections of the analysis could strengthen the impact of an already strong contribution.

Organizational Progeny constitutes a significant advance in our understanding of the day-to-day working of international politics. It adds nuance to existing theories of organizational politics, such as principal-agent theory, and to our knowledge of how non-state actors behave in international politics. As in domestic politics, more decision making than we might expect is made by staffers at various international organizations. And these bureaucrats learn to navigate future change by designing and then staffing new organizations that are often surprisingly insulated from state pressure. What remains to be seen is whether the protections afforded to organizational progeny yield policy outcomes that would differ from less-insulated organizations, as well as whether the tendency to insulate is broader than what Johnson claims.

Review of Organizational Progeny

Alexandru Grigorescu

Loyola University Chicago.

Tana Johnson’s Organizational Progeny: Why Governments are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance addresses a series of big questions that are relevant to a broad International Relations (IR) and Political Science audience. This should not be seen simply as a study on the workings of Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) and the role of their bureaucracies. Its theoretical arguments and empirical sections have important implications for a large number of fields and subfields. The book advances our understanding of the changing dynamics of global governance. It refines existing explanations of delegation relationships and connects in novel ways elements of institutional design to the role of bureaucracies. Even more broadly, by contributing to the increasingly rich IR literature on international bureaucracies, Organizational Progeny also offers important and, so far, insufficiently explored linkages to the literature on domestic institutions.

The broader thought-provoking implications of this book derive from a set of important questions regarding why, when and how bureaucracies become involved in the formation of new IGOs. To answer such questions Johnson’s study builds on the recent principal-agent literature focusing on international institutions. Yet, she moves away from simplifying assumptions that principals dictate outcomes to agents and shows how complex bargaining processes taking place between these two main types of actors shape the new organizations. In addition, she considers the important role played by other actors outside of this delegation relationship (the ‘external stakeholders’), such as international bureaucrats from other IGOs.

The book argues that international bureaucrats from more insulated IGOs and that are part of broader alliances of actors play important roles in setting the institutional design agenda for new organizations. In addition, it posits that the greater the involvement of international bureaucrats in such institutional design, the more insulated the new IGOs will be from governments. The use of bureaucratic insulation both as an explanatory and an outcome variable (in different processes) allows Johnson to disentangle the complex dynamics that have led to the erosion of government control over global governance institutions. The study thus goes beyond previous work simply positing that bureaucracies in IGOs ‘matter.’ Organizational Progeny shows when and how they have an impact on international politics and adds a dynamic dimension that lacks in most studies of international delegation.

Johnson’s meticulous approach to assessing the plausibility of her predictions is also truly impressive. She tests her arguments both through a large-N study and a set of detailed case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Food Program (WFP), the UN Development Program (UNDP) and UNAIDS. Moreover, she considers the cases of the Financial Action Task Force and the International Energy Agency to assess scope conditions and the boundaries of where her arguments hold. The reader is likely to come away from these tests with a strong confidence in the study’s assertions.

Indeed, Organizational Progeny addresses in a thorough and comprehensive way the important questions that it sets out to answer. Yet, like all truly path-breaking books, this study is also likely to lead to exciting new research directions for both IR and, more broadly, Political Science scholars. Below are a few such; possible offshoots of the questions addressed here by Johnson.

First, all of us conducting research on IGOs may consider complementing Johnson’s case studies with additional instances of bureaucracy-driven institutional design. It would be particularly interesting for future research to add to the cases from the UN system discussed in this book (the IPCC, WFP, UNDP and UNAIDS) others from the alternative IGO ‘families’ such as the European institutions or the Bretton Woods organizations. Such additional studies might lead us to uncover other variables explaining the process through which new IGOs are established. Have strong US (and other great power) controls over the Bretton Woods institutions left less room for IGO bureaucrats to exercise their influence and, implicitly, have they led to fewer cases of organizational progeny among multilateral development banks? Similarly, how has the EU’s complexity, the relatively small number of members, and the apparent fluidity of its structures, membership and rules affected the likelihood that it generate new IGOs? Johnson’s book offers a blueprint for scholars who seek to understand the role of independent bureaucracies in such additional organizations.

Indeed, the scholarship on IGOs often tends to become somewhat narrow because of our familiarity as researchers with only one or a handful of organizations where we have developed the necessary expertise. (In this respect, Johnson should be commended for the broad set of organizations she considers.) Yet, because of our relatively narrow expertise, it is useful for scholars of the multilateral development banks and the EU to assess how new important arguments, as those from Organizational Progeny, travel to their organizations.

In seeking additional case studies, future research may even consider some unsuccessful attempts of establishing new IGOs. These would offer additional variance to the likely outcomes discussed by Johnson and, implicitly, they would add arguments regarding when and why states support and oppose the emergence of organizational progenies proposed by bureaucrats.

Lastly, such additional cases may also allow us to understand better which states are more likely to support bureaucracy-driven initiatives, and which ones are more likely to oppose them. Moreover, they would help us identify other cases, such as those discussed by Johnson, where IGO bureaucrats approached some states to request that they be the ‘front’ for new IGO proposals, but, perhaps, also cases where states preferred that new initiatives be perceived as coming from ‘impartial’ IGO secretariats rather than from individual governments.

Another important line of inquiry that derives from the deeper understanding of the independent role of IGO bureaucracies that Organizational Progeny has offered us could focus on the actions of IGO bureaucracies as ‘non-unitary actors’. Johnson indeed hints that bureaucracies do not always act together and that we should expect different bureaucracies to have conflicting interests regarding the establishment of new IGOs. This observation leads to the broader question: when and why do IGO bureaucrats oppose the establishment of a new organization? Do some fear competition from the new IGOs? While Tana Johnson touches upon this question (especially in the discussion of the climate change issue-area), it is worth exploring even further. Are there certain additional variables that can help us understand IGO bureaucracy preferences involving the establishment of new IGOs? Are the age of the organization, the size of the budget and the recent experiences with expansion versus downsizing of the organization relevant for answering this question? One interesting way to go forward in pursuing answers to these questions is to complement Johnson’s analyses focusing primarily on (i) interactions between states and (especially) (ii) interactions between IGO bureaucracies and state representatives with (iii) analyses of interactions between multiple IGO bureaucracies (such as those discussed in works such as Biermann, 2008; Biermann and Koops, forthcoming). Indeed, Johnson’s work emphasizing the independence of IGO officials is a must-read for the growing number of researchers seeking to understand such interactions between IGOs.

Yet another interesting question deriving from Organizational Progeny that future research may want to consider is whether the book’s arguments may help us also understand other types of institutional change that fall short of the actual establishment of an IGO, such as the creation of a new office or department within an existing IGO. In fact, we should expect IGO bureaucrats to prefer new offices in their own organizations rather than new IGOs. That is because the former outcome could potentially lead to increased budget and prestige for the original organization and even clearer paths to promotion for individual IGO officials. When do states and IGO bureaucrats prefer new IGOs rather than simply new offices/structures within existing ones? Moreover, do states sometimes prefer altogether leaving issues outside of IGOs? For example, the most efficient organization dealing with corruption may currently be an NGO (Transparency International) that was established by a handful of former World Bank officials. Is that another example of an unsuccessful attempt to establish a new IGO and, if so, what can we learn from it?

A last important question that may be sparked by the findings of this book is how these arguments about IGO bureaucracies’ independent actions differ from those related to national (or even subnational) bureaucracies. Indeed, the concluding chapter of the book offers a very useful discussion of the American Politics literature on bureaucracies and suggests that the field of IR can benefit from conclusions reached by this rich literature. Yet, one could also wonder how much American Politics and Comparative Politics can benefit from conclusions such as Johnson’s, drawn from the study of IGO bureaucrats. As IGO bureaucracies are considered (often for unclear reasons) to be ‘different’ than domestic ones, studies such as Organizational Progeny should be viewed as excellent opportunities to expand the variance of independent and dependent variables associated with similar studies on domestic politics.

This last suggestion leads to yet another question. How different are, in fact, IGO bureaucrats from those working in the domestic realm? Are they more insulated from mechanisms of accountability? Is their ‘cosmopolitan’ character relevant for understanding their actions? Now that Johnson’s book adds in a significant way to the literature focusing IGO officials, it becomes increasingly important that IR address such questions. Future research could assess the degree to which our findings in IR (such as those in this book) can ‘travel’ to American Politics and Comparative Politics. Although we have been accustomed for a long time to draw lines between domestic and international politics, it is worth seeking parallels between such fields, at least in cases where we have apparently common units of analysis such as bureaucracies.

In sum, Organizational Progeny is a rich, comprehensive study that challenges the deep-held state-centric assumption in IR. It is a must-read for anyone interested in developments in the international realm. Moreover, its contribution to the principal-agent literature and its detailed discussion of bureaucrats’ actions will make it appealing to even broader Political Science audiences. Perhaps just as important, we should note that we are likely to refer to this book for years to come as it has opened the door for new and exciting research agendas.

Exploring the generalizability, dynamics and policy implications of Organizational Progeny

Tana Johnson

Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC.

Seventy years ago, representatives from approximately 50 countries attended inter-governmental negotiations that crafted the United Nations (UN). It was a milestone in international relations. And it is this type of negotiation – a fancy hotel, overrun by government officials who eventually emerge with a charter to be ratified by states – that we still picture when we think of how international intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are created.

But today’s reality is different. The IGO population has exploded, and only about 35 per cent of the IGOs in existence today were crafted by states alone (Shanks et al, 1996). Instead, most institutional design negotiations include international bureaucrats who are already employed in the UN or other IGOs. These individuals have a stake, and a say, in the proliferation of global governance structures. Governments solidified an international bureaucracy in 1945 – and ever since, bureaucrats themselves have participated in expanding it, often through the phenomenon of offshoot organizations that I dub ‘progeny’.

Unlike a mere bump-up of resources in the parent organization, progeny are full-fledged new institutions that (as with institutions more generally) are difficult to dismantle later. Prominent examples include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), International Energy Agency (IEA), Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), UN Development Programme (UNDP), or World Food Programme (WFP). And their propagation produces complex organizational family trees, touched by inter-generational links that are similar to what we see in human families.

This is only part of an even more important and broader pattern that arises in comparative case studies and in analyses of nearly 200 randomly sampled IGOs. Compared to intergovernmental organizations created by states alone, IGOs crafted with international bureaucrats’ input are more insulated from states’ interference. I find this pattern for a variety of mechanisms that states conventionally use to control global governance structures: financing, oversight meetings, representatives and voting rules. This means global governance structures are getting tough for states to manage – not just because those structures have proliferated and become more complicated, but also because international bureaucrats craft progeny in ways that rebuff interventions by states. National governments are literally ‘losing control’ as the phenomenon dampens their traditional control mechanisms and raises the amount of resources that states would have to expend to steer, monitor or reverse the activities of offshoot IGOs.

Three knowledgeable reviewers have carefully considered Organizational Progeny and the phenomenon it explores. They commend the argument as novel, accessible, convincing and consequential. They praise the book for tackling a series of big questions – concerning delegation, institutional design and non-state actors’ importance in governance – that animate the theory and practice of politics. Yet Joshua Busby, Tanisha Fazal and Alexander Grigorescu also raise stimulating queries and extensions that fall under three main themes: generalizability, dynamics and policy implications.

Generalizability

During the initial design process, international bureaucrats working in pre-existing IGOs insulate new IGOs from states’ interference. This finding holds entwined theoretical implications for work on delegation, institutional design and bureaucracy: bureaucrats shape new institutions in ways that complicate the delegation challenges of governance. Quantitative and qualitative approaches show that the finding emerges across many organizations, geographic regions and time periods. But several of the reviewers’ questions exhibit a desire to find additional ways to probe the generalizability of the book’s takeaways.

For instance, what types of international bureaucracies would be most successful at launching progeny? Although proliferation per se is not a dependent variable, there is information about the quantity and quality of something closely related: international bureaucracies’ participation in institutional design negotiations. In the random sample of IGOs, the secretariats of the UN and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) were among those that stood out as frequent design participants. The UN is foreseeable, as it covers dozens of policy areas and possesses a secretariat of over 40 000 people. Initially the FAO may be more surprising, but it coincides with two predictors flagged in the book. One is alliances with fellow non-state actors. Another is moderate insulation from state control – after all, a potential parent bureaucracy that already enjoys high insulation would lack motivation to try to set the institutional design agenda, while one with low insulation would lack ability to do so. Both predictors help to explain proliferation success within the FAO’s family: as detailed in one of the case studies, the FAO secretariat successfully launched the WFP after cultivating partnerships with civil society groups and reducing vulnerabilities to US government influence.

This example also begins to address the question of what predicts unsuccessful attempts to establish progeny. The discussion above hints at two factors relating to the potential parent bureaucracy: lack of alliances with fellow non-state actors and lack of moderate insulation from state control. Both factors garner support in the book’s examination of the WFP’s origins. With process-tracing, we realize that the FAO secretariat’s successful proposal for the WFP in the 1960s was preceded by a similar but unsuccessful proposal for a ‘World Food Board’ in the 1940s – before the secretariat had forged alliances with non-state actors and diversified the organization’s funding sources.

Future research can build on this foundation to explore other potentially relevant bureaucratic, state or system characteristics. Doing so may require a move away from large-scale quantitative analyses, because by definition any sample or census of the IGO population looks at IGOs that actually have been created. Instead, focusing on a single organizational family would be a promising tactic to uncover ‘dogs that didn’t bark’, control for other factors, and investigate how international bureaucrats deal with individual member-states (Johnson, 2015).

This vision for future research also dovetails with the suggestion to explore how well the book’s findings hold for the European Union (EU), multilateral development banks or other organizations outside of the UN family. To test the argument on intergovernmental organizations that scholars and practitioners tend to care about the most, Organizational Progeny limited the pool of case studies to IGOs whose membership is global and whose design negotiations involved at least one great-power state. This excluded bodies such as the EU or regional banks. Yet while such organizations do not appear in the detailed case studies, they are netted in the randomly sampled IGOs, and quantitative analyses found that the book’s argument held even after controlling for an organization’s geographic scope and specific region.

The EU was not compelling for initial hypothesis-testing, as its famously active bureaucracy and unique supranationalism make it a potentially easy but non-generalizable case for the book’s argument. The EU’s bureaucratic core has a particularly strong interest in further institutionalizing supranationalism, and steady membership expansion has facilitated ‘goodies’ such as new agencies headquartered in new member-states (Posner, 2005; Groenleer, 2009). But it is not only the EU family that probably fits: even among the multilateral development banks, where wealthy donor states tend to exert much influence, we see parallels to organizational progeny. For instance, the World Bank secretariat has benefited from the creation and administration of funds such as the Global Environment Facility (Pomerantz, 2014).

Seeing such similar developments across different international bureaucracies also speaks to the question of how well the findings travel to studies of bureaucracy in comparative or American politics. In some ways, international bureaucrats are distinctive. They are at the end of a long delegation chain, with the potential to claim something that would not be credible for other actors: representing a truly global community, not just a particular country or business sector or civil society agenda. Domestic bureaucrats cannot (and ought not) profess to be filling that role. Moreover, international bureaucrats operate in an especially complicated environment that merges the complexities of politics from various national systems. Here, even more actors can be used for counterbalance – not just leftist versus rightist parties, or legislators versus executives, but also one region versus another, developing countries versus industrialized ones, and so on. Domestic bureaucrats generally do not face as many opportunities to selectively align with political actors who share their preferences, while simultaneously claiming to pursue the interests of a much broader community.

On the other hand, there are important similarities. For instance, the American politics literature also offers evidence that bureaucrats are strategic, interested in survival and expansion, tend to self-select into policy areas they care about, and maneuver under constraints imposed by political actors (Carpenter, 2001). Yet other than limited work on topics such as delegated legislation in Commonwealth countries, or flaws-by-design in US government agencies, there has been little research on the role of domestic bureaucrats in creating new institutions at the national level (Zegart, 1999; Page, 2001). This should be remedied, with an eye toward the bigger issue of how international relations research can inform – not only draw from – other subfields of political science.

Dynamics

Alongside these questions about generalizability, the reviewers demonstrate curiosity about wider dynamics. For instance, in addition to their theoretical similarities, are there direct interactions that transmit knowledge and preferences between domestic and international bureaucrats? Moreover, is norm- or policy-entrepreneurship by top international bureaucrats a factor that should have appeared in the analysis? Both questions prod the internal workings of IGOs, where employees have distinctive backgrounds, expertise, networks or leadership abilities.

Organizational Progeny appreciates such individual characteristics. Yet one of the book’s main aims is to reveal how international bureaucrats’ widespread role and impact in institutional design negotiations go far beyond sporadic or singular great-man accounts. Therefore, cataloguing the training, capabilities, career trajectories, acquaintances and entrepreneurship of international bureaucrats is largely left to the IO Bio Project and other undertakings that focus on individuals (Reinalda and Kille, forthcoming).

Nevertheless, three things are worth noting. First, sometimes people who assume leadership of IGOs do have substantial experience in national policy making and take on a flavor of ‘political appointee’, because top IGO officials often need endorsement by the overall state-membership. But second, many people today spend their careers in the orbit of a single IGO family, rather than skirting through a revolving door from national governments. With the proliferation of global governance structures in which people can attain long-term policy experience, as well as the creation of a more formal international civil service code, short-term secondment of national officials to IGOs has decreased since the 1950s.

Hence, third: although bureaucratic heads are important, Organizational Progeny finds that they are not always the source of entrepreneurship in creating offshoot organizations. Instead, they may be mere facilitators (or occasionally, burdens) for entrepreneurial underlings. For example, the book’s case study of the origins of the UNDP shows that UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie supported, but did not initiate, efforts by David Owen and other UN employees who insisted on a new IGO that would provide technical and financial assistance to poor countries. Therefore entrepreneurship is surely part of the story – but it is not such a rare thing, and it does not only emanate from international bureaucrats at the head of IGOs.

The observation relates to another question about dynamics, this time about organizations rather than individuals. As expansionary inclinations have been found to be quite common in international bureaucracies, what would predict an overall preference not to create IGO progeny? This is a productive path for follow-up research, and I can offer guidance.

Risks and entanglements must be weighed, for organizational progeny carry many of the same challenges that human offspring do. In infancy they require much care, and in adolescence they demand more independence – but as in human families, bonds will persist. Progeny are unlikely to seem attractive if a bureaucracy already can go about its work without concerns about interference by states; progeny are unlikely to seem feasible if a bureaucracy lacks allies vis-à-vis states. In short, the two factors dampen the motive and opportunity for creating offshoot organizations. If some outside party floats the idea of progeny when these factors are absent, the IGO’s staff should suspect that the idea was not made with their own interests at the forefront.

A preference not to create IGO progeny is probably connected to the far bigger question of the conditions under which actors are likely to find themselves in relationships that are cooperative (rather than conflictual, competitive or cooptive) (Gordenker and Weiss, 1996; Biermann and Koops, forthcoming). A potential parent bureaucracy will hesitate to create progeny if it does not perceive conditions for a cooperative relationship with the offshoot. Features such as the potential parent’s age, budget size and recent experiences with expansion certainly may matter – but in work elsewhere, I have begun constructing a theory based on even more general factors. At least two conditions lie at the heart of cooperative relationships between organizations: the ideational factor of shared values, and the material factor of distinct resource bases (Johnson, 2015). If both are in place, the team can truly cooperate, jointly pursuing something beyond what is already being done.

These thoughts are not explicit in Organizational Progeny but are aptly illustrated by the book’s case study of the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Beginning in the 1980s the World Health Organization, the UNDP and four other UN-affiliated IGOs established in-house programs to tackle the AIDS epidemic. Wealthy donor states grew frustrated with the costs of this arrangement, and in the mid-1990s the US government led demands for a new IGO to handle all AIDS initiatives and eradicate redundancies in programs and funding. Initially the international bureaucracies refused; eventually they went along after states agreed that bureaucrats from the six pre-existing IGOs would design the new IGO. The parent bureaucracies realized they could not count on a cooperative relationship with their offshoot: it was not their idea, it would siphon their own AIDS resources rather than tapping new pools, and it would co-mingle rival values about whether to approach AIDS as a health problem or a development problem. Under these conditions they did not prefer progeny, and instead would have liked to maintain their individual in-house programs.

Policy Implications

The discussions of generalizability and dynamics illustrate international bureaucrats’ fascinating position. They are strategic actors who seek to represent a global society as well as satisfy their own interests. They must appraise and anticipate the international policy environment, deciphering how to move the world in the desired direction while evading backlash. But, as the reviews note, this raises questions about their ultimate policy impact. Does international bureaucrats’ awareness of constraints prevent real divergence from states’ policy preferences?

Space exists for real divergence. Because preferences are rarely identical across all member-states, IGO staff often have leeway to claim that their policy preferences are backed by some subset of the membership, or serve the collective good even while irking individual states. By creating offshoot organizations with greater insulation than they themselves enjoy, bureaucrats from the parent IGO increase this space. Recall UNAIDS: the six pre-existing bureaucracies were angry at being pressed to design an offshoot. They moderated – but did not abandon – their predisposition to design a new organization that would be strongly buffered from future ‘meddling’ by states. One innovation involved dedicating seats on UNAIDS’ governing board for three types of actors: states, the parent bureaucracies and civil society groups. With this element of insulation, UNAIDS’ policy agenda exhibits more activism and a greater development-orientation. The organization still needs to worry about backlash, but it has been able to go beyond policies member-states or the WHO bureaucracy would prescribe.

Yet evidentiary requirements should not hinge on divergence from states’ policy preferences. State-centrism in international relations scholarship deems that non-state actors matter only if they are shown defying or coercing states. But this is an overly narrow, conflict-based view: a lack of resistance from states does not prove that non-states actors had no impact. On the contrary, it can mean that non-state actors wield much influence as states struggle to figure out their own policy preferences. International bureaucrats matter not only when they diverge from states’ preferences – but also when they shape those preferences, alter the balance of capabilities among states or craft the governance structures in which states interact (Barnett and Duvall, 2005; Jinnah, 2014, p. 29).

Consider the origins of the IPCC. In the 1980s, when bureaucrats from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) were pushing for a new international institution dedicated to climate change, most states had little access to climate science ;and little inclination to change their behavior. The few states (such as the United States) with climate science capabilities were the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, which had much to lose if climate policies were deliberated internationally rather than domestically. Yet through the intriguing maneuvers detailed in Organizational Progeny, international bureaucrats and their allies eventually baited the Reagan administration into secretive design negotiations. They launched the IPCC in 1988, and 4 years later another Republican administration would sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a commitment to curb emissions and address climate change. Scores of other governments followed.

True, UNEP and WMO bureaucrats were not able to coerce states to unwaveringly pursue costly mitigation efforts. But that does not mean they had no impact. The creation of the IPCC, despite resistance by some powerful states, facilitated tremendous shifts in states’ access to climate science, their appreciation of the dangers of business-as-usual, and their acceptance of international fora for prescribing policies for ‘modern’ and ‘sustainable’ economies. Recent developments – such as the United States and China’s bilateral deal, and multilateral negotiations in Paris in December 2015 – would have been unthinkable before the creation of the IPCC.

The larger point is that for climate change and many other policy areas, international bureaucrats are not only influencing individual policies. Rather, they also are transforming the global governance landscape and the lens through which states consider policy options. Even without defying or coercing states, their impact is important and persistent.

But that relates to another question posed in the reviews: do states later strive to unravel this impact, even in low-politics issues that do not directly threaten state security and survival? For instance, in the climate realm we observe states pursuing emissions commitments through the UNFCCC, whose secretariat lacks the kind of insulation exhibited by the IPCC. As another example: in the health realm, the US government demanded the creation of new oversight mechanisms following revelations about corruption among beneficiaries of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Therefore, although international bureaucrats may possess tools for pushing states, states also retain some tools for pushing back.

Organizational Progeny does not deny this. At the institutional design stage that is the focus of the book, this tug-of-war between states and international bureaucrats tempers what both parties can do. States’ control of global governance has not completely vanished, but it is being eroded. As the phenomenon of organizational progeny increases the quantity and insulation of IGOs, states can no longer rely on traditional control mechanisms such as budget monopolization or unilateral vetoes. To steer, monitor or reverse organizational activities, states often need to consider more inventive and costly interventions. They are likely to consider such alternatives quite readily when high-politics are at stake, but that does not mean they never clamp down in low-politics. In fact, examples such as the Global Fund reforms are instructive not because of the intervention – but because of the time that passes before states figure out what is happening and muster the necessary resources to respond.

And that relates to a question about whether Organizational Progeny’s argument is too restrained. As a scope condition, the book anticipates that the greater an issue’s salience to states, the smaller the institutional design role (and therefore impact) of international bureaucrats. In particular, if a prospective IGO would cover high-politics matters such as defense, crime or governance, then international bureaucrats’ design influence is expected to be small or non-existent. However, the reviewers envision international bureaucrats exerting influence over the design of IGOs pertaining to security-related issues such as human rights – so should the scope condition about high-politics be elaxed?

As a discipline, political science needs to ponder the meaning and measurement of the prevalent concept of salience. In human rights, for instance, ratifying a treaty is no longer considered an automatic sign of salience for a given state. Instead, scholars pay closer attention to governments’ citation of particular treaties when justifying costly sanctions against countries where rights are violated (Wong, 2012). This is well-suited to human rights policy but does not readily apply to health policy, or agricultural policy, or myriad other international policy areas. We need a shared, implementable strategy for defining and measuring the crucial concept of salience.

Ideas in Organizational Progeny can be refined to accomplish this. For empirical objectivity and replicability that also aligns with long-standing theoretical expectations in political science, the book operationalized salience in terms of high-politics and proximity to state survival. With the concluding case study of the IEA, the book itself offers evidence that international bureaucrats’ design influence occasionally arises even in high-politics. The reviewers suggest further probes – perhaps of real-world outcomes precluded by the book’s scope condition – to investigate whether international bureaucrats have more influence than anticipated in the realm of high-politics.

This is a promising avenue for future work. In the book’s dataset of randomly sampled IGOs, the Inter-American Count of Human Rights (CIDH) is among the minority of cases in which the predicted outcome does not match the actual outcome. CIDH is an offshoot of the Organization of American States, and it displays key elements of insulation. Yet it is a high-politics institution, charged with interpreting and appraising governments’ commitments regarding human rights. This exception helps prove the rule: overall patterns still hold about progeny and insulation being less likely in high-politics. But it also provides a good start for thinking about salience. The next step is to work, as a discipline, to develop an even more refined yet standardized way to comprehensively capture salience across time, actors and issues.